I’ve fallen into the habit this summer of roasting whatever vegetables we have on hand for dinner, usually with just coconut oil, salt and pepper, sometimes with one or two other spices from the cabinet added in, and then arranging them all on a plate like they’re fancy. These potato fritters are a perfect example of that. At first glance, they seem elaborate, but when you get down to it, they’re really just local vegetables arranged and barely adorned in a new way.

There have been times in my life where I’ve thought that arranging a plate—or picking out an outfit or cleaning the sink or organizing a bookshelf—is a shallow, silly, empty thing to do. It’s not reading a book. It’s not deep discussion. It’s nothing cerebral or heady or life-changing in and of itself. Nobody looks back at the end of her life and says I wish I’d made more dinners prettier. And yet somewhere in my soul I think I’ve always also known that you can’t argue with the way it hits you when someone hands you a plate that’s taken obvious time and attention to prepare. You can’t pretend you don’t feel a little special when you make the extra effort every once in a while to get dolled up for dinner or to pull out the fancy dishes for a dinner with friends. There’s something inside me that loves to celebrate and to savor. There’s something that delights in an ordinary set of vegetables, piled up together in an unordinary way.

I made this recipe twice this week: the first time in mini potato fritters (as pictured in the recipe below); the second time, in slightly larger rounds that yielded more than two bites apiece. I liked them both but I think I liked the mini fritters best because they crisped up easier and all the way through, creating a sort of hash brown/fried potato base for candy-like roasted squash, fresh and bright cucumber corn salad and an exotic kick of cumin dill yogurt on top. Tim and I lament often that we are some of the least hype-y people on earth, and it’s rare for us to be saying, “You have to do this!” or “This is the best ever,” enough so that sometimes it’s hard for people to know that we’re happy and having a good time. But when Tim took a bite of these baby fritters Tuesday night, he used words like “best” and “flavor profile” and “killed it,” so take that as a good sign.

hey! ps! Have you noticed our new CookSnaps plugin below? All FLW recipes now have an option where you can upload your own photos of trying them at home. We would love for you to try it out—and let us know if you have any questions.

The second time I made these fritters was considerably easier and faster than the first, mostly because I knew where I was going with everything and how it should end, so let me give you that advantage, too. Think of these fritters as four or five mini recipes that get layered together on a plate at the end. You start by roasting squash, then boiling corn, then grating potatoes (the most laborious task, and I won't blame you if you try to find a strong-armed someone to do it for you instead) and straining them over the sink. Those potatoes get lumped onto an oiled baking sheet, seasoned and oiled on top and baked. Meanwhile you make a salad/salsa and a yogurt sauce. I'd give myself about an hour to do everything, start to finish, but you might take less or more time.

Oh! and also! Feel free to make all the components ahead of time and just layer them before serving. The fritters, once layered, won't taste great a few hours later; but if you keep the yogurt sauce set aside until just before you want to eat, you'll be golden.

Ingredients:

for the roasted squash:

2 tablespoons coconut oil

1 pound yellow squash zucchini, sliced into rounds

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

for the corn:

2 cobs (3/4 to 1 pound) unshucked organic (non-GMO) corn

for the potatoes:

1 pound potatoes, grated

2 to 3 teaspoons coconut oil

Salt and pepper, generously sprinkled

for the tomato cucumber corn salad:

1/2 cup chopped tomatoes or bell peppers

1/2 cup chopped cucumbers

Corn kernels (from above)

Handful of fresh basil, torn into small pieces

1 tablespoon olive oil

Salt and pepper, to taste

for the cumin dill yogurt sauce:

3 tablespoons plain yogurt

1 teaspoon cumin powder

2 to 3 teaspoons chopped dill (or, in a pinch, basil works)

Salt, to taste

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375F and place coconut oil in one or two baking dishes big enough to hold zucchini. Add zucchini, salt and pepper; toss together to distribute everything evenly, getting zucchini in an even layer as much as possible. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes or until wilty and golden.

Fill a large pot with enough water to cover corn. Shuck the corn, bring the water to a boil over medium-high heat and add corn, cooking it for 3 to 5 minutes. Remove cobs to a plate to cool.

Next, grate a pound of potatoes into a big pile, and place it in a tea towel or cheese cloth. Squeeze over a sink to strain as much water as possible (it'll be a lot). Grease 2 baking sheets with 1/2 to 1 teaspoon coconut oil. Scoop piles of the potato mixture on top, flattening each one. For mini fritters, make the mounds about a tablespoon in size. For larger, but still appetizer-sized fritters, make large mounds that are 2 to 3 tablespoons in size, still flattening them as much as possible. Place a small drop of coconut oil on the top of each one. Salt and pepper all over the top. Bake 10 to 15 minutes, until golden, and flip. Bake for another 10 to 15 minutes more. They're ready when they're golden and crispy.

In a large bowl, mix together tomato corn salad ingredients, adjusting salt to taste.

Last, mix together yogurt, cumin, dill and salt, again adjusting salt to taste.

2 / A few blog updates, some obvious (design changes) and some not (new hosting). If anything seems wonky when you stop by this space, it probably relates to one of the things we’ve changed, and we probably don’t know—so please tell us.

3 / A a new library book I’ve been waiting for, an interview with its author (posted here) and my favorite quote from that interview: “My description of this room will differ from your description of this room will differ from everybody else’s description of this room because we are limited and graced by our own pair of eyes, the things that we notice in the foreground versus the background—That’s the beauty of creative work.”

4 / A good chunk of time thinking about this story, especially because of one line about always wanting everyone to understand what you do, and why you can’t and they can’t, so just stop: “For several years I felt this overwhelming need to explain ourselves and the decisions we made as a family to other people. I hated that I lived in that trap, and yet I couldn’t seem to get out of it. But God slowly freed me of that in Oklahoma.”

5 / Constant nostalgia about this and sometimes this and disbelief that they happened almost two full years ago.

6 / Extra work hours, new projects, more social activities and several upcoming trips—and how all of these things, with the tighter schedules they bring, are good things we are being given right now.

7 / Remembering August, when I cried in the middle of Wal-Mart, by myself, walking the aisles to buy copy paper so we could print out paperwork to try to get back earnest money from a house we thought we’d buy, but lost.

8 / Remembering last night, when I cried in a Goodwill parking lot, next to Tim, out of sheer and overwhelming joy at how shockingly we have been comforted and encouraged since then.

9 / Words like these, from Naomi Shihab Nye : “I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.”

EARLER TONIGHT, I FOLLOWED TIM OUT OUR KITCHEN DOOR and down the driveway to the garage, where we both got in the car. He turned the key in the ignition, looked at me and asked, “Where are we going?” and I shrugged with a “Anywhere you want!” So he backed out passed the chain link fence where our neighbor’s flowers grow and the giant bush sprouts a spider’s web longer than my height, pointing the car anywhere and nowhere, warm Tennessee air flowing through our open windows.

We followed I-24 West to Shelby, which is a confusing thing to say because Shelby is East Nashville, and we live in South Nashville, but to get there you take I-24 West. In East Nashville, we cruised down Gallatin and eventually down the street where I used to live, passed my old yellow bungalow that I already have a hard time remembering, just over two years after I left. And somewhere between the piece of pumpkin vegan cake we ended up sharing from Wild Cow on the Jeni’s patio and the soup bones we ended up buying at the grocery store in Green Hills, I turned to Tim and said the thing to which a lot of you will probably relate. “I have to tell you something,” I said to him in the now-darkness of this September Thursday night. “I’m just not sure what’s true about health anymore.” [Read more…]

Exactly one year ago today, Tim and I were up in the Chicago suburbs, driving out to the DuPage County courthouse to lift up our hands and solemnly swear that we were who we said we were and get the nice lady in the sea of cubicles to hand us our marriage license, our marriage license! I remember walking out of that building, into the crowded parking lot, hand in hand with Tim and thinking, our marriage license! It’s official now! Not just in terms of a giant dress in the closet and a chalkboard seating chart, but, as in, according to the government, we’re actually about to do this thing. Three days from now, we’re getting hitched!

I know I’ve said this here before, but, seriously, there are so many more details involved with planning a wedding than I ever would have imagined, and, when you plan your wedding fast, like we did in six months, you learn to scrap a lot of those details in the name of staying sane—like a wedding cake maybe. We had pretty much ruled it out, thinking that there’d already be a full meal and a full spread of a cookie table, so who needed a cake?

My mom, that’s who.

Listen, she’d been a champ about a lot of wedding things she’d originally seen a different way: my not having a veil, my seeing Tim before the wedding, no little boxes of Jordan almonds. But the one thing she violently disagreed on was not having a wedding cake. Cake is tradition. Cake tastes good. Plus, and this is where she hit my soft spot, cakes are the thing my grandma used to make for weddings as a caterer. We have these amazing black-and-white photos of her tall, tiered versions, usually with one of those vintage bride-and-groom sets on top, and oh, you guys, I can’t tell you how much I wish she could have still been alive to make mine last October.

So we talked about it and we talked about it, and we agreed: the next best thing to having your grandma, the one who taught you how to bake and love food, make your wedding cake is having your mom, who fed you before you knew she was feeding you, do it, especially when your mom is the kind of person who takes such intense pleasure in being the one to provide a meal.

It would be my gift to her to have one, her gift to me to make it, and, in the process, everyone would have some cake.

So months beforehand, Mom tested pumpkin cake recipes, almost giving up the idea once or twice. Turns out there are several truly bad cake recipes out there in the world and, not every recipe translates into three or four tiers.

But come our wedding day, her work was a thing of beauty. And that afternoon, she let the caterers transport the tall, dark, spiced cake topped with homemade cream cheese frosting down to the tent. It was simple, like us, no frills or iced flowers, and it was sweet and, honestly, I liked it quite a lot—partly because it tasted good, mostly because she made it for me.

Last week, remembering that cake and the work Mom put into it, I emailed her and asked for the recipe.

She sent ingredients.

Do you have directions, too? I wrote back.

She said cream the wet with sugar; mix the dry; combine it all.

Baking times? I wrote back. Size of pan? Oven temp?

And then the correspondence became a confusing, winding email chain of 9X13 pans and guessing on oven temperatures and the promise of a different, much better pumpkin cake recipe, which, if she had it to do over again, is the one she would have used for the wedding last year.

She had me laughing, and frustrated, and aware that when I talk to her I am looking at my future, and so an hour or two later, there I was, mixing ingredients in the kitchen like my mother’s daughter who was her mother’s daughter, according to a recipe she got from a Chicago news reporter or a lady at her old church or somewhere else, it’s still unclear, pouring it all into a greased and floured rectangle pan, letting the warm and autumn smell of it fill our kitchen.

I may not have wanted a wedding cake, but I’m glad we had one anyway, and I’m glad I made a version of it last week—moist and pumpkiny and wonderful layered with homemade whipped cream and nuts—so that when I looked at it, like I looked at my mom’s in a big white tent, I could think, heart full, that more than anything else?

This year in Chicago, fall’s gone above and beyond. Literally. Yesterday was the third day in a row where temps soared into the 70s. Yes, you read that right: 70s! In late October! While the trees are already ten shades of orange and red! I went somewhere last night and had to take my sweater off, that’s how warm I was. It’s the kind of thing people talk about wherever you go—church, the grocery store, chatting on the phone—as if, no matter what your feelings or indifference about this crazy gorgeous season that transitions from the long daylight of summer into the snow and frost of winter, one thing remains, at least this year, at least where I live: autumn’s got your attention.

I guess the same could be said of many things, from football to TV shows to the pleasure of reading a good book: the die-hard lovers will take the good and bad alike. They’ll cheer for their losing team. They’ll watch when no one else is. That’s like me and fall: rain or sun, cold or warm, thick and thin, I’m already sold. It’s many of us and pumpkin, especially this time of year, when we can have the pancakes and the muffins and the carving and the Jack O’ Lanterns. But just like it’s more fun to watch a winning team and just like some Octobers are easier to love than others, some pumpkin recipes are more impressive, more endearing, more oh-my-gosh good.

Like the best pumpkin bread you’ll ever have for example.

I am so excited about this pumpkin bread. To put it another way, if pumpkin is fall, this pumpkin bread is these last few days of October. It is weather warm enough to mean no jacket. It is driving home with the windows open. It is comfort and daylight and the best of summer with the best of the months after, where the lawns are covered with crunchy leaves and you just step outside and feel the sun on your face.

It doesn’t last long, despite yielding two loaves, but that’s only because it tastes so good and maybe because that’s how the best things go. And over the next few days, as the weather returns to low 40s (or lower! did someone say snow?), I’m going to hold onto the last few slices, savor them the way I do October, and enjoy every bite.

I have been trying to write this post for the better part of two hours. I keep writing something and deleting it, writing something and deleting it.

To be honest with you, I guess that is because I don’t know what to say. A dear friend of mine got some very bad news this last week, the kind you never think you or someone you love will get, and she has been on my mind ever since.

I wish you could meet her. I wish you could know the kind of friend who extends grace when you don’t, who challenges you by example, who makes you laugh out loud with her stories. The kind of friend who, when you show up unannounced at her doorstep Wednesday night, welcomes you inside, no questions asked, comforting you more than you are comforting her, demonstrating faith in the One Who Made Her as you recount specific Providences together.[Read more…]

It’s not very interesting to hear that someone’s content or that she’s counting her blessings, but that’s really all I’ve got for you today, all frustrations and disappointment eclipsed by other, fuller emotions, so I’m sorry. What can I say? At least there’s a recipe at the end.

This weekend, I went antiquing in Gurnee (where I bought seven white plates, a gift and a vintage camera, all for under $35!) and had dinner at Cracker Barrel, after which I fell asleep in the car, just like I did when I was eight. I stayed up late watching television, I went to church, I phoned an old friend from freshman year who still makes me laugh like crazy, and the skies were always blue, and the sun bright, and people I loved nearby.

One of my best friends went on a first date this weekend, too, after we spent the morning shopping, and she looked so nice, I was so proud of her for giving it a shot, and even though she and the guy had an only OK time, the whole thing reminded me how much I love her and am glad to know her. I tried on a jacket at H & M and a random stranger came over to tell me it was supercute, I had to buy it, so I did, and I wish very much I could take him with me every time I go shopping. And there were bike rides and fresh tomatoes from the garden and DVDs of Life that my friend Becky gave me for my birthday, and I just think, you know, in the seasons of life, there are some times that are especially good, and this is one of them.[Read more…]

Well, as promised, I’m still high on fall. I’ve been sipping hot apple ciders all week and cuddling in my blankets, the windows open, at night. Pretty soon, I’m hitting an apple orchard with two of my friends and co-workers, and I’m already dreaming of the apple cider doughnuts and pumpkins I will buy. How about you? Are you taking in the season where you are? Are your leaves turning colors?

If you live anywhere like Chicagoland, you’ve probably been seeing a lot of gourds and squashes around. I think they’re so pretty, with their autumnal color palette and reminder of harvest. It’s enough to make me want a pumpkin patch of my own (along with an herb garden, green pepper plants, more tomatoes…).

Here’s what you can do with one of those pretty butternut squashes: If you like sweet potatoes and you like french fries, boy, pay attention. No, I’m not talking about sweet potato fries (though I love those). In fact, I’m suggesting squash fries. Butternut Squash Fries. The instructions could not be simpler, and the calorie intake won’t give you the slightest guilt. Plus, just look at the color!

Essentially, this is what you do: buy a medium-sized squash, chop its ends, peel it, halve it and scoop out the insides. Then slice the flesh into long slices, just like french fries. Arrange on a baking sheet covered in cooking spray, top with salt and bake. That’s it.

Well, I say, That’s it, like you’ll barely believe how easy it is. I have to be more honest than that. In truth, peeling a squash is a little tricky. Or least peeling my squash was: the skin is thick! And tough! And my peeler is antiquated and I’m not the most adept with using it. Whatever the case, though, you’ll feel a sense of victory after peeling the thing, and that’s something.

I should also say this: Butternut Squash Fries, though quite tasty, are not quite the deep-fried fingers you may be used to. To obtain maximum flavor, you’ll want them to get very crispy, so watch them in the oven. And you’ll want to eat them hot, so don’t bring them over to someone’s house like I did, eating them an hour or so after they baked. I did, however, hear from at least one reliable 12-year-old boy and a high school sophomore that these were delicious. So that’s something, too.

Now I’ll have to leave you with these for a bit. With all these fall flavors in full bloom, I am headed north to even cooler weather and more vibrant colors, to visit a beautiful, dark-haired little girl who’s not yet one month old and her handsome brother who says adorable things like “Hi, Shanna” on the phone when I call, and their lovely parents, two of the nicest people I know. Fall is good, life is good, see you soon.

Directions:
Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees. Chop the ends of your butternut squash and peel its skin. Cut it in half and scoop out all the seeds.

Cut the flesh into wedges or sticks, whatever looks like french fries to you. HG swears by a crinkle cutter, so if you have one, by all means, do. Place on a cookie sheet sprayed with non-stick spray. Cover lightly with coarse salt.

Place tray in your pre-heated oven and bake for 40 minutes or so, flipping halfway through baking process. Fries are done when they are starting to brown on the edges and get crispy. Serve with ketchup, or however else you enjoy fries or sweet potato fries!

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"That's at the root of all giving, don't you think? At the root of all art. You can't hoard the beauty you've drawn into you; you've got to pour it out again for the hungry, however feebly, however stupidly. You've just got to." Elizabeth Goudge

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." J.R.R. Tolkien

"Every kind word spoken, every meal proffered in love, every prayer said, can become a feisty act of redemption that communicates a reality opposite to the destruction of a fallen world." Sarah Clarkson